New York, January 26, 2015--The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned that Argentine journalist Damián Pachter fled the country early Saturday out of concern for his safety, according to news reports. Pachter broke the news on January 18 that Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor investigating the 1994 terrorist attack on Jewish cultural center AMIA, had been found dead the night before he was to testify about the attack.

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New York, October 30, 2014--The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns Tuesday's raid by Argentine police on the offices of La Brújula 24, a radio station and news website, in which the outlet's journalistic materials were confiscated.

The long-running feud between the administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and critical news outlets deepened. The Supreme Court ruled that provisions of a 2009 broadcast law that would require some media companies, most notably the critical media conglomerate Grupo Clarín, to divest holdings—in theory, to break up monopolies—were constitutional. Beyond the legislation, the climate remained polarized, with officials publicly berating Clarín and other media groups, and those outlets criticizing all administration activities. The government continued with its policy of punishing critical media outlets and rewarding favorable ones with official advertising, and appeared to extend its advertising war to the commercial realm by reportedly forbidding supermarkets to advertise in newspapers as part of a price-freezing measure intended to combat inflation. Critical media alleged the tactic was meant to further harm outlets that don't receive state advertising, a claim the government denied. President Kirchner, after 10 years of dominating Argentine politics along with her husband, the late President Néstor Kirchner, faced challenges to her government in late 2013. The president's party suffered significant defeats in congressional elections, judicial reforms failed, corruption allegations surfaced in the administration, and the president suffered health problems. Press freedom advocates were dismayed by a ruling on an Argentine defamation case by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights—part of the human rights protection system of the Organization of American States—that decided for the first time that a criminal sanction for defamation did not affect freedom of expression.

New
York, December 18, 2013--Argentine authorities should immediately release a journalist
who has been detained for more than a week and accused of sedition, the
Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

For more than a decade, courts and legislatures throughout Latin America have found that civil remedies provide adequate redress in cases of libel and slander. Over this period, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights -- an autonomous judicial institution, which is part of the human rights protection system of the Organization of American States (OAS) -- has issued key decisions supporting press freedom, including a 2004 landmark ruling that struck down a criminal defamation conviction of a Costa Rican journalist.

Dear OAS Ministers of Foreign Affairs: Ahead of the assembly of the Organization of American States on Friday, the Committee to Protect Journalists urges you to oppose any attempts to debilitate the regional human rights system. The failure of member states to preserve the autonomy and independence of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and its special rapporteur on freedom of expression would make citizens throughout the hemisphere more vulnerable to human rights violations and represent a blow to democracy in the Americas.

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Disputes between Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government and top media outlets intensified. Despite a Supreme Court ruling that ordered equitable distribution of state advertising, Kirchner’s government continued to withhold government ads from outlets critical of her administration, while lavishing business on those that provided favorable coverage, a CPJ special report found. Both the justice department and a federal appeals court fined the executive branch for ignoring the ruling, but the government showed no intention of complying. The administration also continued its practice of attacking and insulting journalists and executives associated with the country’s two principal media companies, Clarín and La Nación, sometimes using smear campaigns on public television shows. Those media groups, in turn, relentlessly criticized the government. The result was a highly polarized climate, with outlets devoting considerable coverage to discrediting one another, and citizens being deprived of objective sources of information on vital issues of public interest.

The debut of the HD
version of GrupoClarín's cable news station TN could not have come at a worse time
for the Argentine media conglomerate. Conspicuously missing from Monday's premiere was coverage of a
new criminal complaint in which Clarín's lawyers accused the government of
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of inciting violence against the media
group. In what the company now acknowledges was a misstep, the complaint named
six pro-government journalists.

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In the pitched battle between Cristina Kirchner’s administration and critical
media outlets such as those owned by Grupo Clarín, the very credibility of
journalism is at stake. Argentine citizens are deprived of objective sources of
information on vital political and economic issues. A CPJ special report by Sara Rafsky